What Kind of Marketing Strategies Should You Consider When Starting a New Business

Although starting a business has become quite easier in the past two decades by almost every metric according to the World Bank, it still requires a significant time-commitment and startup capital to start a business properly. And with the rate of failure in the first five years being relatively high, business-minded people should really pay attention to their strategy going into the first year and ensure they maximize their chances. Ensuring you get the marketing right is one of the cornerstones of success – This article will help you get started with marketing and learn how to differentiate between the winning and effective strategies and the less cost-effective and wasteful ones.

Don’t Shackle Yourself with Old Marketing Strategies

Using old marketing strategies in today’s business world would mean certain failure. The marketing world has evolved beyond recognition in the last twenty years, and anything one might’ve learned then is virtually useless today. This is primarily due to the new tools in the trade, the new marketing mediums, and the change in consumer sentiment and response to different forms of marketing.

As a general example, you’d have a much easier time selling a product today if you get an influencer to record a custom message to his fanbase if they bought your product through a startup like Fourthwall than non-interactive forms of advertising – cost-effectively as well. This is only one form of advertising that was virtually inconceivable just 20 years ago. That’s why it is important to ensure you stay up-to-date with marketing strategies and only use the latest and most effective methods and abandon older and obsolete marketing strategies.

Try to be Data-Driven

It is important to be data-driven and document your early attempts at marketing – when starting out unless you’re sponsored by venture capitalists and get a lot of investment early on, your access to capital will be severely limited. So, you will not be in a position to misuse a lot of funds and spend money inefficiently. You need to ensure you get the most bang for your bucks and that you’re consistently moving forward.

That’s why it is extremely important to ensure you’re spending money optimally and are actually sustaining growth due to your strategies, and the best way to do this is by measuring your marketing strategies empirically and collecting data. Thanks to a lot of new technologies in the last decade, there are hundreds of methods you can use to effectively collect a large amount of useful data and analyze it over long periods of time. This way, you’ll be able to pinpoint the concrete effects of some of your strategies and you’ll be able to see how much brand awareness, how many website clicks and product sales, etc. you manage to achieve through spending one dollar on marketing.

Ensure You Have Enough Experience to Handle the Tasks

Coming up with marketing strategies and executing them aren’t easy tasks. It requires a diverse array of skills in technology, messaging, branding, social media, and much more. If you have a small business, chances are you’re already swamped by a hundred other tasks. It is important to learn when to handle a task yourself and when to outsource it. This skill is consistently ranked as one of the most important skills to have by a manager, so you shouldn’t be afraid of outsourcing your marketing efforts or hiring an agency to get you started.